


Veritas Liberabit Vos

by Caelumi



Category: White Collar
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-13
Updated: 2012-11-13
Packaged: 2017-11-18 14:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caelumi/pseuds/Caelumi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Neal tries to make Peter the joke, the last laugh is on Neal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veritas Liberabit Vos

“I thought you copied out of books.”

“ _Forging_ , Peter. I’m not five and this isn’t arts and crafts.” 

Peter, on the couch, raises his hands in the time-honored gesture of an innocent man. Neal can see the wry shape that the man’s lips want to twist into. He goes on before they can.

“Forging Pre-Raphaelite art from the page is a betrayal of everything those artists stood for, but yes.” He concedes with grace. “When I have to.” Neal lifts his canvas onto the easel and draws fingertips over the cream surface, stretched taught and waiting. Every canvas he’s touched has had a life, a humming sort of vibrancy in its potential. “But I prefer not to. I enjoy real inspiration.”

He also enjoys making Agent Peter Burke uncomfortable, but Neal is wise enough to keep such things to himself. A touch of flattery to balance the weight of Peter’s discomfort; manipulation is a thin line, a challenge. He likes that Peter is that, someone whose company never gets stale. He waits for the bait to be taken.

“Inspiration.”

There it is. 

Neal cocks a corner of his mouth upward and lifts an accompanying shoulder in a shrug. Peter slides out of his suit jacket--Neal doesn’t believe for a moment that the antagonism of their relationship only goes one way, because Peter keeps buying his suits off the sales rack at Macy’s despite all efforts to the contrary--and Neal enjoys a moment of intense voyeurism while the man is turned away. The wrinkles across the shoulders of Peter’s white shirt, too thick to be expensive, the back hem peeking up over his I-mean-business belt. The way that his collar doesn’t fold all the way down over the loop of his tie.

The fingers of Neal’s right hand itch, curl, and he covers them loosely with his left. 

“I thought that there weren’t many men in Pre-Raphaelite art,” Peter says, tossing his jacket across the top of Neal’s neat bed. He looks like he’s not sure what to do with himself there; fingers dust through his hair before arms cross over his chest and then hands find his pockets, all in rapid succession. He looks over. “Neal.”

Neal blinks, shakes his head, refocuses. “Sorry. No, you’re right. The one we’re forging, however, does.” He’s not wearing shoes, doesn’t like to paint in shoes if he doesn’t have to, and his socked footsteps toward both his wardrobe and Peter are hushed. “When you’re trying to be true to the beauty of reality, why paint a man?”

There’s a levity to the question that shows his truth; Peter misses it, reaching for the draping fabric that Neal pulls down from the top of his wardrobe. 

“You keep this handy?”

Neal shrugs. “I’m an artist, Peter.”

“You’re a forger, Neal.” But he’s smiling because it’s a game that has gone on long enough that all the sharp, hurtful edges have been worn away to make a comforting, soft shape. It’s the shape that lives between them when they walk shoulder to shoulder. It’s the shape of the words that don’t have to be spoken anymore.

If Neal let himself think about those things most precious to him that he can’t assign a dollar amount to, he’d wonder why he actually asked Peter to do this. But Peter is pulling his shirt from his pants and unbuttoning it. There’s the white undershirt, right on time.

How plebeian. 

Neal can’t help but like it. 

He pictures the story of it, the way he’d construct an identity if Peter Burke was an alias. The hamper. The bleach in the whites. Elizabeth folding each one, smoothing them down to press them into a drawer that smells of cedar while Satchmo sits on the bed.

His chest is tight with a sudden, strange wrench of tissue and conscience. “Maybe you’re right.” 

“Well I’m glad you’re finally thinking like a--”

“No,” Neal pulls the navy drape from Peter’s crooked arm. “This.” One hand spreads out as if he can physically encompass the effort of what they’re doing. “I can copy it from a book.”

It’s rare that he is the cause of such a shift in social climate; Neal is consummate at many things and keeping the talking points where he wants them is such an old skill that it is like muscle memory now, fluid and thoughtless. But his control slipped, he can see it when Peter’s mouth thins into a pencil line. Neal drops his eyes and smooths a hand over the fabric he’s folded once over. 

“Now wait.” Peter points at the canvas, sitting near the kitchen table full of paints and palettes. “If for one moment this painting rings as a forge, it’s going to be Diana that’s in danger. You said yourself that it would be better if we did it this way. Was that a lie?”

The definition of a lie has been evolving between them for years now. It began with a handshake and a cheap green lollipop and seems to shift every time either of them open their mouths.

“No,” Neal says. The thing about lies, what makes Neal the best, is his commitment. A lie must be committed to. “It wasn’t.”

Peter nods like there was no other way for that answer to go and his white collared shirt is pulled off broad shoulders.

Neal wishes that he had orchestrated this moment, the moment that the entire thing became Peter’s doing, wishes that he had been the one to lift the baton but in the end it’s just dumb luck. He hands the drape back and turns before Peter can climb out of the cotton undershirt that, in Neal’s mind, Elizabeth has folded. He has what he intended but now is daunted by its arrival. 

Sometimes he tells himself that Peter Burke the alias is not Peter Burke the man, but he never quite believes himself when he does. He knows Peter too well. He is exactly who he imagines him to be.

He busies himself at the table with his back turned as Peter disrobes, exactly what he’d wanted from the other side of the glass. A corner of the print he’ll be painting is touched, smoothed down. He knows the work but has never had any great love for the movement it encompasses. Personally Neal thinks Waterhouse was better when he was older and his strokes had gotten choppy and flat instead of being soft and...

Comfortable.

He runs a hand over his mouth to cover the sigh.

When the couch creaks a complaint, Neal finally turns. He tells himself to treat this like a con except he’s not sure of the mark anymore and that’s always a bad sign. “Wow.”

Peter frowns. “It’s not that bad.” He’s laying on the couch, naked, the navy fabric draped in awkward clumps and pulls over pale skin. 

“You need to take more vacations.” Always better to joke, easier to diffuse a situation than build it. Neal grabs the print and heads over; Peter fidgets the closer he draws, flicking a corner of fabric to hide more of his thigh. “Do your legs ever see the sun?”

It has the desired effect, even if the laugh that Peter offers sounds unwilling. “And I’m sure you’re Adonis under those polished suits.”

“I consider myself to have a pleasing skin tone, thank you,” Neal says, “but no. Today it is you who are Adonis.” He brandishes the picture in hand to make his point and then settles it on the coffee table where he can reference it, _Awakening of Adonis_ , in all its high-minded glory. A practiced eye twitches and redrapes and keeps his mind focused far from the shift of Peter’s muscles under his fingertips and knuckles. Far from the thought of the suit laying in abandon on the bed feet away. Far from the very implicit nakedness that has spread itself ungracefully across his sofa. 

Peter Burke is no Adonis; no one would ever use him as a model of masculine beauty. His lips are a thin, drawn bow, his forehead too high. Neal the artist sees these things just as Neal the artist had seen the symmetry in Kate’s eyes and the perfect heart shape of her face. 

Or maybe it is Nick Halden sees those things, saw them. George Danrary, George Devore. Chris Gates. Those men who he is who care about the perfection of the human body trapped in a medium of artistry.

Maybe those men are the men who loved Kate. 

Even after Kate knew his real name hadn’t there been a quiet voice in the back of his head telling him the damage had already been done? How could she stop herself from looking into Neal’s eyes and searching for Nick? Neal Caffrey, Neal the CI, Neal the ex-con, current con, liar, 2 mile radius, Neal _Bennett_ , he’s never been looked at the way Peter looks at him. 

Peter’s teeth are crooked, he has creases between his eyebrows from worry and suspicion... and yet Neal is sure that the only man Peter sees when he looks at Neal is Neal. There is a real beauty in truth, and Neal may have never known it if not having been shown it by Peter.

“Hey.”

The word is a question, as light as the fingers that have come to rest on Neal’s wrist. Neal shifts his attention to Peter, who has ruined the draping all over again by sitting up. Navy folds bunch in his lap and Neal breathes out. 

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You sure?” Peter has a way of tilting his head, leading with his chin. It makes him invested, it shrouds him in a caring that is active and tactile. Neal still doesn’t always understand how it can be directed at him. “You’re a little pale,” Peter says. “Not as pale as my legs, but close.”

Neal drops his face and laughs, the sound expanding from his chest. He’d wanted Peter off balance and here he was the one with two left feet. Someone should revoke his dance card, if it wasn’t stolen in the first place.

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” 

“What?”

He shakes his head and straightens. “Something van Gogh said.” A fold of fabric is reached for and Peter, normally so stubborn, lays back like the most docile of lambs. Is this what leading someone to the slaughter feels like? Surely Neal’s done it before; why Peter should be different he’s not sure. 

No, that’s a lie, and one he’s no longer completely committed to. He can tell how frayed and thin it is; Peter is becoming bigger than Neal’s need to protect himself. Neal feels the truth of it at the corners of his consciousness, feels it at the tips of his fingers.

This second time he arranges the drape he does it from memory. He might not have Mozzie’s talent for it and he might not care, so long as he can hover here. “I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”

Peter seems to sink into the pillows that prop him against the arm of the sofa. It’s not a retreat; Neal can read the lines of muscle relaxing. His fingers skim skin as cloth is moved and neither of them look at each other. The words hang between them and form a new shape, too much of a truth to be entirely comfortable. Neal pushes the fabric under Peter’s arm, over his shoulder, and smoothes it down his chest. When he looks up he realizes that he was the only one not looking. 

There is a moment here. Neal meets hazel eyes and contemplates the colors he’d mix. How he’d paint them so that they were true to life; soft, and giving, and forgiving.

Their mouths are close when he thinks about how blue Elizabeth’s eyes are.

Peter clears his throat. “I hope you’re not going to substitute in Mozzie for the lady in a picture.” 

Neal laughs. Always easier to diffuse than build. He reaches and tilts Peter’s arm up into the right position. “Lucky for you, I think he’d object.”

“Lucky for me.”

If there’s something more in the response, Neal doesn’t look for it. The moment is gone, Peter’s doing whether he understands it or not. Whether he wants it or not. Neal does things on his own terms. One more touch and Peter’s other arm moves into place and it’s over. They’re balanced again, each on their own side of the scales where they belong.

Peter’s not Adonis, but he’s becoming Neal’s own version of something else. Something more true than anything he’s ever put on canvas, or paper, or any other medium by his own hand. 

This is exactly why he’s always forged the masters--they’re perfect, given to him that way, and all he has to do is be faithful to what is already there. All the elements exist; forging well is nothing more than commitment. Attention to detail. Mostly deconstruction with a nearly unimportant gloss of putting the pieces back together. The open possibilities of true originality, on the other hand, are terrifying and daunting. There are no rules save those you construct yourself, no masterpiece save that which you build one layer, one stroke, at a time, from nothing.

Peter is right about a lot of things. The most true and the most haunting is that Neal’s not an artist and he never has been. If Neal was an artist then he’d be able to build something more than the best copies of the greatest works the world has ever seen and the shells of men who love the ideas of things more than the things themselves.

Peter looks at him, calm and sure. Laying his head back onto the piled pillows, he’s smiling as he closes his eyes. There are secrets in that smile that Neal wonders about all the time, every day. “Too bad no one will ever know that I was your muse for a day,” Peter says, his voice a murmur. 

Neal huffs a sound that gets itself so remarkably close to amusement that he surprises himself. He crosses his arms briefly over his chest, rubbing fingertip across his jaw as he looks at Peter. “A secret that I will take to the grave lest I spoil my reputation, I assure you.” He returns to the canvas as Peter laughs and clips the print to the easel. His old, caked palette is slid from the kitchen table and Neal slips his thumb through the worn hole in the wood that knows just how to sit on his hand. “Any profound words from the muse before you’re immortalized?” Green paint is smeared onto a space made already colorful by time and use.

“Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes to make them possible.”

Neal’s fingers freeze between one color and the next. 

“T.E. Lawrence.” He begins to move again. “You never fail to impress, Peter, but I think it’s a little too heavy to make a good sound byte.” Ivory, white and pink puddle down to complete the palette.

“Then you’ll just have to take it to your grave along with the mental image of me in a curtain.”

Neal looks at Peter stretched there, eyes still closed, and then away. Fingertips skim brushes until he has the one that he needs. There is no want in a forgery, no desire. Desire is what gets a man caught. “Only too happy to oblige. And it’s a drape.”

“Tomato,” Peter says, “tomahto.”

Artist, Forger. 

The handle of the brush warms under Neal’s hand as color is mixed. The first stroke is put down and the possibilities for this canvas begin to limit themselves. 

_I paint my dream._

 

[Waterhouse's 'Awakening of Adonis.'](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v442/Nahoko1/WaterhouseAwakeningofAdonis.jpg)


End file.
